


Here, Hold This

by trollprincess



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-25
Updated: 2014-03-25
Packaged: 2018-01-16 23:31:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1365757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trollprincess/pseuds/trollprincess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of the third season finale, Lydia and Kira find common ground.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here, Hold This

The night following Allison's funeral, Lydia dreams of snow.

It doesn't snow much in Beacon Hills. In the winter, what little snow they receive is usually a limp mush, indecisive about whether or not to melt. On ski trips with her family, Lydia would sit by the window on cold snowy nights and watch fat happy flakes twirl through the air on their way down to coat the slopes. But the snow in her dream isn't like either of those.

In her dream, everything she sees is covered in snow. She gets up in bed and a light powdery blanket of snow slides away from her comforter. She places her bare feet on the floor and the snow pushes between her toes like wet sand, not even the least bit cold. Every sparkling flake looks perfectly placed, as though fairies fluttered along from some mysterious place to put them all there specifically as a gift to her.

_Great_ , she thinks, _not fairies, too_.

She leaves her bedroom, and now she's in the hallway just outside Allison's bedroom. More snow, more of that glittery powder dusting the floor. Lydia wonders for a moment if she should peek inside Mr. Argent's room and find him there, if she's supposed to ask him something like in those role-playing video games she knows some of the boys play when they've got time to breathe in between battles against vindictive villains. But something else catches her eye, something long and dark lying half-buried in the snow in the hallway.

Lydia leans down and picks it up. It's an arrow.

Correction. It is Allison's arrow. It's one of the silver-tipped ones which she and Mr. Argent used to slay the Oni. It's her final weapon.

Lydia doesn't cry. She just keeps walking.

When she leaves the Argents' apartment, she's in the police department. More snow, scattered all over the battered and beaten office like a soft white hug. She finds another silver-tipped arrow, this one sticking out of the Sheriff's pencil cup.

The door to his office exits out into Beacon Hills Hospital, and she pads along, barefoot and drawn along by some invisible urge, until she finds the third arrow. It sticks out of the stuffed backing of the office chair behind the nurses' desk, where Scott's mother sits.

The fourth arrow pokes out of the mailbox at Scott's house, tucked underneath a few bills and a flyer for some department store, none of which she can read.

She steps off the porch, walking with careful steps down toward the street, then closes her eyes as soon as both feet rest on the snow-covered street. A rumble of thunder draws her back again, and she opens her eyes, turning around to see the Yukimura house. Snow clings to it as if drawn by static electricity, and Lydia feels a strange urge to pick up the entire house and shake it, to see if it would scatter like in a snow globe and float back down right back where it came from.

At her feet, the broken half of the last arrow rolls over the edge of the curb and skitters through the snow until it taps against her toes. She reaches down and picks it up.

The point of the broken arrow is jammed into the Yukimuras' front door like some odd ornament meant to scare off the neighbors.

That thunder rumbles again, and Lydia could swear she sees a fox, fiery and flickering against the clear white snow, scampering into the bushes, yipping as it goes.

*

The next day, Lydia tries to avoid Kira.

In terms of symbolism, the dream feels like the beginners' edition. The dead have talked to her before, haven't they? Why would her best friend stop talking to her after she died? Allison probably has her on speed dial from the afterlife, hindered only the afterlife's annoying habit of not allowing anyone to provide a straight answer at all.

But … but she gets it. Allison doesn't want her to be lonely. She knows. No dreams full of snow and arrows were really necessary for Lydia to get that.

She attempts to convince herself as she walks from her first class to her second that she won't be lonely. She has friends now. It's only been months, but Lydia vaguely remembers a time before Allison when friends were girls you borrowed clothes from and guys were only allowed if they were gay enough not to stare down her shirt. Danny's still all right, of course – not in the pack, but still a friend – but a year ago she didn't have friends like Scott and Stiles and Allison. She never thought “friends” would ever mean “people who would take a bullet for you.”

The old her would have never defined Kira as a friend. A nuisance, maybe. An obstacle in the hallway, at the very least.

Between second period and third, Kira catches her in the hallway, clutching her books to her chest. She bobs and weaves like an energetic puppy, and Lydia keeps waiting for the familiar whimpers she hears from Prada when he knows she needs a hug.

“Uh, we haven't gotten to talk much,” Kira says.

Lydia shakes her head. “I'd say we've been a tad busy,” she answers. Sarcastic, sure, but not half as sarcastic as she normally is. It's like even her wit is in mourning.

“It's just ...” Kira bobs and weaves again, and now she's on Lydia's right. “There's so many guys, you know?”

“Well, they are forty-nine percent of the population,” Lydia says, playing it off as a joke. She knows what Kira means, though. Hard not to, really. There's this gap in the pack where Allison is supposed to be, and Lydia knows that in the future, Kira will probably fill it. She won't fit in the space the same way, the proverbial square peg in a round hole, but she'll be their warrior when it comes to weapons much like Allison did. It's all boys aside from them, though.

Lydia ducks through a pair of canoodling seniors to get to her locker, and Kira follows, dodging around the two lovebirds much more deftly. Watching Kira's new natural grace makes Lydia feel like a stumbling duckling in a way Allison never did. She turns her lock in frustration at the wrong moment, and needs to start all over again.

“I am just horrible when it comes to talking to guys anyway. I mean, you should have seen me when I first tried talking to Scott. Like at the picnic table? And around new people? I'm not really good with what to say under normal circumstances, and new people, new school, new boys … and then I'm a kitsune and there are werewolves and everyone is dying? I --” Kira flushes a bright pink, and Lydia can't help but smile a little. It's not that there's anything wrong with Kira, other than the fact she's not Allison. Excitement bleeds from her like heat off desert pavement, but there's also worry in her dark eyes, a tightness in her reluctant smile.

“I don't know what to say,” Kira murmurs, and glances down at the floor.

If this were Allison, Lydia would be pointed and flippant, covering any unease or upset with a perfectly placed bout of sarcasm or gallows humor. But Kira's need to mourn is so different from Allison's had become. Lydia imagines it like freshly-blown glass, new and fragile, ready to break if handled the wrong way.

Was it really that long ago that she would have broken a girl like Kira without a second thought?

Now here they were, the pair of them, the only girls in this ragtag pack, a banshee and a kitsune standing side by side in the calm center of enthusiastic human students looking forward to boring weekend plans where, more than likely, no one would die horribly.

“Say whatever you want,” Lydia blurts out. Kira lifts her gaze from the floor, and when Lydia smiles, it isn't forced like she was afraid it would be. “Go on. I'm listening.”

You could light the hallway with the hopeful expression on Kira's face, bright and sunny like a crisp spring day.

And underneath the chatter, the flow of words which scamper from her lips like tumbling kittens, Lydia finds the thread which connects them and holds on tight. The grief burns her palms, but she doesn't care about the pain. Not with someone on the other end of that thread, clutching onto it with just as much force as she.

They talk after third period, and sit together at lunch.

When they cry in the bathroom together after fifth period, it feels like an introduction.


End file.
